Consultations by Chinese Foreign Minister
Yang Jiechi in Moscow at the weekend were expected
to prepare the ground for the visit by President
Hu Jintao to Russia next month. In the event,
however, they assumed a character of immense
significance to international security.

Sustained Russian-Chinese efforts to
"coordinate" their stance on regional and
international issues have been taken to a
qualitatively new level with regard to the
developing Middle East situation.

The
official Russian news agency used an unusual
expression - "tight cooperation" - to characterize
the new template to which their coordination of
regional policies had been taken. This is

bound to pose a big challenge
to the West to pursue its unilateralist agenda in
the Middle East.

Hu's visit to Russia is
notionally to attend the showcase event in St
Petersburg on June 16-18, which the Kremlin has
been carefully choreographing as an annual event
in the nature of "Russia's Davos" - titled the
International Economic Forum. Much excitement is
evident in both countries that Hu's visit will be
a turning point in China-Russia energy
cooperation.

Russia's energy giant Gazprom
hopes to pump 30 billion cubic meters of natural
gas annually to China by 2015 and the negotiations
over the pricing are at an advanced stage. Chinese
officials maintain that the stalled negotiations
are finally going to be wrapped up with an
agreement by the time Hu arrives in Russia.

Indeed, when the world's fastest-growing
major economy and the world's biggest energy
exporter come to an agreement, it goes far beyond
a matter of bilateral cooperation. There will be
uneasiness in Europe, which has been historically
Russia's principal market for energy exports, that
a "competitor" is appearing in the East and the
West's energy business with Russia would have
China as a "sleeping partner". This paradigm shift
provides a backdrop to the East-West tensions over
the Middle East.

Identical position
The Middle East and North Africa turned
out to be the leitmotif of Yang's talks in Moscow
with his host Sergei Lavrov. Russia and China
decided to work together in addressing the issues
arising out of the upheaval in the Middle East and
North Africa. Lavrov said: "We have agreed to
coordinate our actions using the abilities of both
states in order to assist the earliest
stabilization and prevention of the further
negative unpredictable consequences there."

Lavrov said Russia and China had the
"identical position" that "every nation should
determine its future independently without outside
interference". Presumably, the two countries are
now agreed on a common position to oppose any move
by the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO)
to conduct a ground operation in Libya.

So
far, the Russian position had been that Moscow
wouldn't accept any UN Security Council mandate
being given to NATO for a ground operation without
a "clearly expressed position" approving it on the
part of the Arab League and the African Union (of
which Libya is a member).

Evidently, there
is a "trust deficit" here, which is becoming
unbridgeable by the day unless NATO decides on an
immediate ceasefire in Libya. Put simply, Russia
no longer trusts the United States or its NATO
allies to be transparent about their intentions
with regard to Libya and the Middle East. A few
days ago, Lavrov spoke at length on Libya in an
interview with Russian television channel Tsentr.
He expressed great frustration over the West's
doublespeak and subterfuges in unilaterally
interpreting UN Resolution 1973 to do just about
what it pleased.

Lavrov revealed in that
interview, "Reports of a ground operation [in
Libya] being prepared are coming in and suggest
that the appropriate plans are being developed in
NATO and the European Union." And he publicly
hinted at Moscow's suspicion that the US ploy
would be to circumvent the need to approach the
Security Council for a proper mandate for NATO
ground operations in Libya and to instead
arm-twist United secretary general Ban Ki-Moon's
secretariat to extract a "request" to the Western
alliance to provide escorts to the UN's
humanitarian mission and use that as a fig leaf to
commence ground operations.

The public
stance taken by Russia and China would pre-empt
officials in Ban's secretariat from
surreptitiously facilitating a NATO ground
operation through the back door. Ban visited
Moscow recently and Russian reports suggested that
he "got an earful" about the fashion in which he
headed the world body. A seasoned Moscow
commentator Dmirty Kosyrev wrote with biting
sarcasm:

There are many ways of politically
telling a guest on one's own behalf and on
behalf of one's international partners: "We are
not very happy with your performance, esteemed
Mr Ban." Often words are not even necessary in
these cases. It's clear that the secretary
general has a thing for the revolutionary
romanticism of civil wars and supports freedom
fighters in general. As a result, he often sides
with arch-liberals from Europe or America.

However, the secretary general of the UN
should not take extreme political positions, let
alone side with the minority of UN member states
on an issue, as he has in the case of Libya and
the Ivory Coast. This is not what he was elected
for. The point is not to compel Mr. Ban to
change his convictions or position, but rather
to adjust his vision slightly in favor of
greater neutrality.

Moscow and
Beijing seem to view the so-called Libya Contact
Group (comprising 22 countries and six
international organizations) with a high degree of
suspicion. Referring to the group's decision at
its meeting in Rome last Thursday to make
available a temporary fund of US$250 million
immediately as assistance to the Libyan rebels,
Lavrov said caustically that the group was
"increasing its efforts to take on the lead role
in determining the policy of the international
community in relation to Libya" and warned that it
should not "seek to replace the United Nations
Security Council, and it should not take sides".

It has become a matter of disquiet for
both Moscow and Beijing that the contact group is
gradually evolving into a veritable regional
process sidestepping the UN for modulating the
Arab upheaval to suit Western strategies. The
clutch of Gulf Cooperation Council states (and
Arab League) that are present in the contact group
enables the West to proclaim that the process is a
collective voice of regional opinion. (Ironically,
France has invited Russia to join the contact
group.)

Tip of the iceberg At
the joint press conference with Yang in Moscow on
Friday, Lavrov came straight to the point: "The
contact group has established itself. And now it
is trying to take responsibility on to itself
about the policy of the international community
toward Libya. And not only Libya, we're hearing
voices that are calling for this group to decide
what to do in other states in the region." What
worries Russia in immediate terms would be that
the contact group might be slouching toward Syria
to effect a regime change in that country, too.

China has been very diplomatic on the
Libya issue so far and has left it to Russia to
bell the Western cat, but it is now becoming more
and more vocal. Yang was quite forthright at the
Moscow press conference in criticizing Western
intervention in Libya. Hardly three weeks ago, the
People's Daily commented that the war in Libya was
at a stalemate; the Muammar Gaddafi regime had
proved resilient; and the Libyan opposition was
overrated by the West. The daily commented:

Libyan war has become a "hot potato"
for the West. First, the West cannot afford the
war economically and strategically ... The war
is too heavy to afford for the European
countries and the United States, which have not
completely emerged out of the economic crisis.
The longer the war, the more countries in the
West will find themselves at a disadvantage.

"Second, the West will encounter many
military and legal troubles ... If the West
continues to get involved, they will be
considered as being partial to one side ... In
regards to military actions, Western countries
will have to dispatch ground forces in order to
depose Gaddafi ... This is totally beyond the
scope of the United Nation's authority, and is
likely to repeat the mistakes of the Iraq War
... In a word, the military solution to the
problem in Libya has come to an end and the
political solution has been put on the
agenda."

Yang's talks in Moscow
signify that Beijing senses by now that the West
is determined to hold the "hot potato" no matter
what it takes, make it "cool down" by hook or by
crook and then consume it without sharing with
anyone else. Accordingly, a recalibration of the
Chinese position and taking it much closer to the
Russian stance (which has been far more openly
critical of the Western intervention in Libya) is
becoming apparent.

Moscow would have
encouraged Beijing to see the writing on the wall.
But the clincher seems to be their growing sense
of unease that Western intervention in Libya is
only the tip of the iceberg and what is unfolding
could be a geostrategy aimed at the perpetuation
of the West's historic dominance of the new Middle
East in the post-Cold War era. Woven into it is
the extremely worrying precedent of NATO acting
militarily without a specific UN mandate.

Lavrov and Yang have since proceeded to
Astana for a foreign ministers conference of the
Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO) that will
negotiate the agenda for a summit meeting of the
regional body taking place in the Kazakh capital
on June 15. The big question is whether the
Russian-Chinese agreement on "tight cooperation"
in the Middle Eastern and North African issues
will become the common SCO position. The
probability seems high.

Ambassador
M K Bhadrakumar was a career diplomat in
the Indian Foreign Service. His assignments
included the Soviet Union, South Korea, Sri Lanka,
Germany, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Uzbekistan, Kuwait
and Turkey.